Perspective, The Real, And A Weird Father’s Day
Being younger I knew that people had different experiences to me, and tried to accommodate people who may be going through something, trying to be kind to them. It wasn’t real though. I mean, it was something I did, and something I understood. I was raised to, but it wasn’t really real. I knew to do unto others only what you would walk a mile in your own shoes. I knew the outside world existed. I knew, but perspective wasn’t real yet.
Swing And A Miss
I almost figured it out once.
High school sucked, I hadn’t figured out how to be social yet, even less talking to girls. I know now that my family knew from my childhood that I was going to have a rough time. Therapists had told them it was coming and to be ready. I had a childhood book called Leo The Late Bloomer about how it was ok to be behind everyone else, eventually you will get there. These days I am able to embrace that I am Leo. Back then, I had no means to cope with the confusion as to why I couldn’t make anything social work.
I switched schools a lot, each time with lessons and growth that could be brought to the next. Each time with new people and new stories I could tell from my other schools. At one point, I left a school and returned to it the next year, and was first confronted with the reality of perspective. No one knew who I was. They knew I existed, but before, I didn’t talk. Now, I made class guides, worked out, and could find weird opportunities to have fun in random situations instead of disappearing into my own nerves. I now existed to them in a way that was different from before.
Behind the scenes, there was a lot going on. Up to this point, I had two groups of people, those who I saw at school and those I saw outside of school. Despite not being social at school, I had always been social. I had relationships come together and fall, friend groups build and dissipate, and a consistent friend group that I would have fun with for the entire time I was silent around those at school. When I left the school I was silent in, I moved to a school where all of my friends were, and my social life instantly thrived. There was a lot of cool stuff happening everywhere, parties, alcohol, and drugs, but eventually, it became too much and I had to make the return.
I knew the perception of me had changed, and had moments where I thought about the differences that people saw, but I just kind of continued on. Similarly, people who had known my name before, I became good friends with. They likely never questioned my experiences and how everything came to be for me. I had changed, I was kind of cool for the first time, but it just kind of happened. Now I realize that it provided the building blocks for me to confront perspective at a later date. The concept of perspective was unavoidable in that it existed and was impacting at that time, but it just wasn’t addressable yet. At this moment I needed to not retreat back to overthinking everything, I just needed to have some fun, and that’s what I did.
38 Slug
My parent’s marriage wasn’t doing too during high school. Arguments increased in frequency and intensity until there was an off-the-books divorce. The actual split wasn’t bad for me though. It meant not only the arguments stopping, but I was able to enjoy each of my parents more as people. The concept of parents as knowing guides was broken, and the dynamic had shifted to accommodate that, letting me be friends with them in a way that didn’t work before.
Around this time there was another major event. Some of my friends were on a hockey team together, and they invited another friend over than usual. We were hanging out in my buddy Davie’s backyard, and he came up to me and asked if I knew how to talk to girls. By this point, I had started to realize that girls were actually just people you could talk to, so I went over and started talking to the key player in this story, Julia.
Julia is awesome. One of the guys in the friends group had a crush on her but it didn’t work out, so many of the guys stopped seeing her much. I kept talking to her and now I consider her one of my best friends.
At home, I was adapting to the new life of being the man of the house. It was me, my mother and my sister. Things were going alright. Could be better, but I kept on keeping on, learning what I needed to do to fill the void. There were some major changes, but I never thought about it too much and just followed the flow. With my mom needing help herself and trying to learn what she needed to do to help us at the same time, I learned that I needed to really rise to the occasion and actively help her while I helped myself too. We all became a very tight-knit unit, which evened our family dynamic out. My mother was no longer strictly a parent, but a close friend, and more than anything else, human.
After a few years of this, that dynamic became normal instead of new. While at this point my father had moved away and lived elsewhere for years, he was still a dad who had left recently in my mind. I saw him often enough, even if it wasn’t that often.
One day I saw Julia and the topic had somehow come up. She hit me with an “I’ve never met your dad.” This hit me to my core. She was the first person who hadn’t known me and had seen this whole story, knowing my family and the changes. Where I saw myself as someone whose father had recently left, I was confronted with another person’s reality where I had, in their experience, never really had a father. This difference in perspective rocked my world.
Confronting Perspective Directly
This provided a moment where the only way I can express it was I was confronted directly with the real. Before, I knew that different people had different experiences that changed what they did. At this moment, I learned that different people had fundamentally different realities. The divorce, a moment that had defined so much of my life experience, a moment which had split my life into a before and an after, was not the only reality of my life. To someone else, my existence only took place in the after.
Julia's statement also changed my own experience with the divorce years after it had happened. Someone in the position where they only knew me after was in a place where they could only see the version of me that existed after. To others they may have known my experiences leading up, when it happened, and how I moved on as a continuous process in different instances of the now. To people that met me after, they only know of the divorce as going back in time, remembering what once was.
This comes with some ramifications that I have never been able to truly digest. If other people’s perspective of me is completely different in a way that can only be expressed as being a completely different reality, that must also mean that my experience of other people is a completely different reality to theirs or anyone else’s. Not only in terms of what anyone sees or hears but also feels emotionally. The way I look at Noah and Kaitlyn for example, just looking at their faces, will never be the same as they look at each other. I may be able to mimic the same angle at almost the exact same time, but we still essentially see completely different people. We might focus on different features, but also the emotional weight is completely different in a way that we can never share.
This became a kind of obsession for me. When I look at someone, I struggle to simply look at them. I manage to compel myself to look at someone while considering the perspective of myself that I experience while looking at them. I see a person who is presenting a book, and I wonder what the experience of that book is. I wonder how, when they read it, it connected to ideas of their life that I haven’t even heard of despite knowing them as a person so well. I can see them as them, but I can also focus on a part of them. Their hair is done a certain way. Sometimes hair is done nicely and worth noting, but sometimes the sky is just blue, and sometimes the hair is just hair. It is there, not to be shown off, but just because it is there. Its being there is the product of not only the person who has done it to some degree, but also the person who last gave them a haircut, and their life experiences that led them to do that style haircut. They may have never thought of that, yet here I am having never met them or knowing of their existence, but seeing the unavoidable reality of their impact on my life in some form.
Then comes more. I am self-conscious about smells. I can smell incredibly well, I know when things are going bad days before other people. Do I smell bad? I ask myself this question multiple times per day. What if this person is self-conscious about their hair. Could my looking at their hair and noting that they indeed have some hair be getting received subconsciously as some sort of judgment on hair? Maybe there is something they don’t like about their hair and they worry that I’m noticing it too. Did they spend time doing their hair to look like that? It’s normal to me, but maybe that normal only exists in the sense that it is a cover-up for something someone is self-conscious about and it is done every time.
I will never experience what they experience when they look at themselves in a mirror. To look at one’s self is a uniquely personal experience in that it can only exist for you. No one else can look at you with a shred of the experience you know about yourself. But is it truly unique if every experience of looking at you is not only unique but based on its own reality of experiences that are experienced only with you? You are only able to see yourself in your own perspective, the same that anyone else can only see you in their own perspective.
It can be rather over-stimulating.
Perspectives Of My Father
On May 5th, 2023 my father died of brain cancer. His death prompted more thinking of perspective, especially since changes with the existence of my father brought about this whole perspective thing.
About 8 months earlier, he started bumping into walls. His personality started changing. He grew tired faster and started to make mistakes in certain things that he otherwise did thoroughly with ease. All of this happened while I was away.
I visited once and noted that he had a tremor in his leg and was a bit thinner than usual, but I thought maybe this is just a sign he is starting to age. Surely if something was consistently wrong he would do something. He told me I needed to see him soon, very soon, but I had no idea what that meant. I was not able to glean his perspective. He knew something would soon come to an end.
Other people around him, coworkers and family, also noticed things going wrong. To one person, he stopped being as loud and got exhausted very fast. To another, he was driving very slowly. To another, his naps became more frequent and longer. To another, he seemed to lean a certain way, kind of tipping to the side. Some had said he should see a doctor, and he said he’d get to it. He never did.
There were many perspectives of him, but he lived a weird life. He was staunchly against vaccines and the medical system. He had a big ego, and always knew what was best for him. He lived at work, and he almost always saw different people separate from each other. While many perspectives from people could guess something was wrong, it seems that people were not able to create a larger perspective, one that supersedes the individual to become a group perspective that everyone had noticed something, and there was indeed something larger wrong that couldn’t be explained by an illness, hip pain, or being particularly tired. A bunch of atomized perspectives failed to come together to create a compelling narrative.
Even if the narrative was formed, it seems unlikely anything would have changed. Eventually, he collapsed and was unable to resist being taken to the medical system any longer. He was brought to the hospital where he would perish 5 weeks later with a perspective moulded by a tumour that now encompassed over half of his brain.
Weird Perspectives Of The End Of My Father
Since the events, I have found multiple specific perspectives that I find weird.
I have my own perspective, which given the events is confusing. He made money to support my family but was never there. When my sister was in the hospital he didn’t show up. Did he support her, or did he not? I showed up, and his work provided my ability to show up as I did, so does that count for anything? He probably still should have shown at least here and there for 5 minutes. When he was in the hospital, we all showed up. He said my sister should have never taken drugs in the hospital and that it caused issues. He took them when he was there. We supported it. Did he deserve it? Was it the right thing? He spread lies about my sister’s condition. One piece of me wants to say rib bozo #packwatch, but another knows that anger and dismissal aren’t how I want to handle trauma these days. Another side of me wonders how traumatic this event was, given that I have already become my own father figure in the time that he had left. In my mind, he had already gone more than once.
This was contrasted in the form of a friend from high school who I fell out with a long time ago. His father had left when he was young, and my father was a father figure to him. His perspective puts my father in a position of not necessarily being my father but the father of someone else. I heard a lot about how great he was to everyone and how he could step up to help him in his life. A reality that starkly contrasts the reality I lived. It was the same person at the same time doing the same things. Somehow in these conditions, two completely opposite opinions formed. He said that my father went down like a top g, just working resiliently to the end where he went out on his own terms. My perspective does not agree. Does one of these hold more weight? It is time to be positive or time to stand by my convictions. Does it matter? Is one of these perspectives worth more than the other? I know mine is to me, I imagine he feels the same of his own.
Then comes Julia’s perspective. I can’t know what she thinks, but in my perspective of what her perspective could be, I have always been fatherless but am now newly fatherless. She is sympathetic to me but has no stakes when it comes to my father. I am close to my father (or am I), and I am close to her (or am I), but she doesn’t have anything more than an idea that I had a father somewhere and now I don’t. I am an image so close to and heavily impacted by my father without an actual direct connection to her. This can be taken further in that when I told her and her family that my father had died, they were devastated, shocked by the news, seeing my life would change forever. In a strange way, the presence of my father became more real to them at that moment. In a way, I now am more impacted, almost having more of a father than before, through the complete lack of a father. He existed more through no longer existing to someone who he never really existed to.
My first Father’s Day with no father. Another Father’s Day as someone fatherless for years. Someone else’s first Father’s Day without my father as a replacement for their own father. A weird day.
Somewhere out there there's a perspective of me that exists only at Eddie's wedding after a minimum of 6 shots. That sounds so cool.
Oncle Spencer